Each US presidential administration I've been under has always cited cherry-picked, sound-bite US statistics -- and has the gall to take credit for them. It's like someone's constantly watching the metrics, and every positive blip becomes a candidate for being a talking point.
They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals.
Even worse, talking points like that prime people to expect the government to be constantly manipulating variables in the economy, which causes inefficiency and necessarily leads to more unelected officials running more of the country -- since constant manipulation is inaccessible to legislators.
They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals.
Even worse, talking points like that prime people to expect the government to be constantly manipulating variables in the economy, which causes inefficiency and necessarily leads to more unelected officials running more of the country -- since constant manipulation is inaccessible to legislators.